A Digital Examination of Eastern Germany

Thursday, May 19 2011, 3:23 AM

7 a.m. - waking up in the morning. Gotta get down to the tram station, gotta catch my tram. I see my friends.
7:45 - We're driving on the highway. Cruising so fast, I want time to fly.
Kicking in the front seat, sitting in the back seat, gotta make my mind up - which seat can I take?
It's Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday, everybody's looking forward to this weekend, weekend!

Still reading? Well, this is just a follow-up to the Analog Examination of Eastern Germany. Here are the photos that weren't worthy of film and the locations that didn't cater to the analog camera's 105mm lens. And of course the text that would otherwise go to the Recycle Bin. I recommend ignoring this post and heading directly to the gallery instead: Digital Easter.

Control Tower

The airport that once was home to this control tower closed some 20 years ago. After that, the little restaurant behind it was still in use for some time. It closed long enough ago to fall into decay but not long enough ago to be removed from the tourist guides that lured us there. Once again, lunch was cancelled and replaced with "Urban Exploration".
The slowly fading scratches in my arms still remind me that it wasn't easy to get in. Why are the best preserved places always the hardest to enter? Oh, right.

Big Cog...wheel

In not so pristine condition was a century-old water mill next to a river. In fact, almost nothing but the walls remained standing. Still, they looked beautiful in the morning sun and climbing around on them was a nice warm-up for things we ended up not doing later that day.
Oh, and I also tried to make a video of myself crossing a half-collapsed bridge that would fully collapse under my weight and have me falling into a little river quite spectacularly. But the bridge held, so no video for you here. Sorry about that.

Rauchen Verboten!

If the above picture doesn't look familiar to you, then you haven't yet checked out the gallery with the analog pictures from this trip. Or you have but you forgot about the picture. I don't blame you.
How do you find huge abandoned places in Eastern Germany? Just buy a tourist guide and look for a restaurant. As we pulled into the parking lot of the railway feed ward, we quickly realized that it was what was called a "zaksteeg" (means something like "dead end") by my dutch friends.
Well actually, we aren't really friends. We just happened to go on a fateful trip a few years ago that left everyone with photos and videos of everybody else and we now meet every once in a while to make sure nobody plans to publish any of the material. We call it the doctrine of Bilaterally Assured Humiliation or in short, BAH.

Main Hall

On the last full day of our trip, we were driving through the city to another abandoned place we had on our list. As it turned out, the place had been demolished and in it's place allotments had been built, together with an accompanying club house / restaurant.
We passed the time until our Schnitzels were done by making fourth-grade jokes. Don't worry, I won't reproduce them here. All I want to say is that they were almost on par with what the British can make of them. We also devised a pattern for a joke that is even less funny than both "your mom" and "that's what she said". Behold:

In anticipation of huge traffic jams on the German highways, the end of the trip was marked by a very quick stopover at a former Gasometer. But most of us just snapped one or two different pictures and then skipped directly to the coffee break. After that, it was time for swommellen, aufsaltzen and until next time.